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More "Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opposers of intellectual emancipation, of "Jacob's Ladder Democracy," so superior to Christianity, have triumphed at Cincinnati, and trampled under foot, with impunity, the soul-stirring doctrine of "converging lines." The next steps with these "enemies of righteousness" will be the rack, the gibbet, and a second edition of the infernal inquisition! Will the friends of the "White Basis" Governor of Tennessee tamely surrender their dearest rights to these Cincinnati crusaders, without a single struggle? ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... a drunken frolic caused the removal of a painful and useless exhibition. A very interesting paper upon London life in the last century occurs in the second volume of Knight's 'London;' in which it is observed that "a gibbet's tassel" was one of the first sights which met the eye of a stranger approaching London from ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... gibbet! You always manage me. Well, let us rather go to the 'pater' than to the rabbi; but at least let my servants keep their ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... in sessions time, to catch a glimpse of the whipping-place, and that dark building on one side of the yard, in which is kept the gibbet with all its dreadful apparatus, and on the door of which we half expected to see a brass plate, with the inscription 'Mr. Ketch;' for we never imagined that the distinguished functionary could by possibility live anywhere else! The days of these childish ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed on gallows, were taken away by ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... build a bark of dead men's bones, And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast, Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans To fill it out blood-stained and aghast; Although your rudder be a dragon's tail Long-sever'd, yet still hard with agony, Your cordage large uprootings from the skull Of bald ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union; but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases herself in the complete steel of sovereign ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... who, far from turning up his nose at her, conceived the wild idea of attaching himself to her for life. With this in view he determined to follow her in order to ascertain whither she would lead him—to Paradise or to the limbo of hell—to a gibbet or to an abode of love. Anything was a glean of hope to him in the depth of his misery. The lady strolled along the bank of the Loire towards Plessis inhaling like a fish the fine freshness of the water, toying, sauntering like a little mouse ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... "The gibbet, then, I suppose, must be my doom?" said Lord Menteith. "Yet I wish they had spared me the halter, were it but for the dignity ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... caldron, which, as fast as it grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon's blood. To these they poured in the blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they bound the infernal spirit to answer ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... plunging through space has seemed to many a feat of almost legerdemanic skill, when all that is required is a simple mechanical apparatus and a quick, firm movement of the arm in using it at the right moment. A crane similar in appearance to the oldtime gibbet is erected near the track, and may have served as a warning by its suggestive appearance to some would-be train-wrecker. Its base is a platform two feet and a half square, with two short steps on top to assist the person hanging the pouch; a post ten feet in height passes ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... and because he was younger, more reckless, less prudent, than he of riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan by the memory of his former services ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... against him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies. This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was instantly without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned to death by the rebellious barons: he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was cut in pieces, and thrown to the dogs;[****] and his head was sent to Winchester, the place whose title he bore, and was there set on a pole and exposed to the insults ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... better to keep his rod in pickle awhile. It seems that the Lords of the Council and all the nobility were there, and it is a point of religious etiquette in London that in the hangman's house nobody speaks of the rope; but our poor John gave them the gibbet as well. It was a fearful thing to do, but nobody will make me believe he had not got his reasons. He hasn't been here since, but I am certain he has his eye on some fine folks, and, whoever they are, I'll bet 'my bottom dollar' they ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... shuddering, "I would not, for a full hundred, ride alone through the moor you will pass. There stands a gibbet by the road, on which a parricide was hanged in chains. Pray Heaven this night be no omen of the ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... actual murder, perpetrated by the first or second officers with many blows of steel-knuckles, a rope's end, or a marline-spike, or by the captain, in the twinkling of an eye, with a shot of his pistol. Taking the seamen's view of the case, you would suppose that the gibbet was hungry for the murderers. Listening to the captain's defence, you would seem to discover that he and his officers were the humanest of mortals, but were driven to a wholesome severity by the mutinous conduct of the crew, who, moreover, had themselves ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time there is no mention of a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the Restoration had maintained a very even pace—a ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... bid the man of Waterloo recite His story, and the crop mown by his art, Or ere the herald of eternal night On his green mound with fatal wing did smite And cross his hands above his iron heart? Or shall we gibbet on some satire here The name thrice-bought of some pale pamphleteer, Who, hunger-goaded, from his haunts obscure, Dared, quivering with impotence and spite, Insult the hope on Genius' brow of light, And ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... scholar may be familiarized to Greek and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a single word, though he may be incapable of tasting an entire sentence. Let it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that "conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... love! haven't you good and plenty, without calling upon me? Are you going to let these stock-jobbing land-pirates on 'Change gibbet you as a solemn warning to ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... sometimes burned; but thieves are hanged (as I said before) generally on the gibbet or gallows, saving in Halifax, where they are beheaded after a strange manner, and whereof I find this report. There is and has been of ancient time a law, or rather a custom, at Halifax, that whosoever does commit any felony, and is taken with the same, or confesses the fact upon ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... Cambridge, and Huntingdon. He surprised several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... magistrate—that's enough," said Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to the rails Jackaroo, who lay in front on the inside, drew away to let the favourite up under his lee. Flibberty-gibbet, on the other hand, the second Dewhurst horse, had been bumped at the first fence, and pecked heavily on landing. Little Boy Braithwaite in the canary jacket had been unshipped, and was scrambling about on his horse's neck. He lay now a distance ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... gallows erected for that purpose at the cross roads of the Croix-du-Trahoir; their bodies to remain there for twenty-four hours, then to be cut down and brought back to Paris, where they were to be exposed an a gibbet," ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... his creator. There are some strong and curious passages in Chapter XLIV, in which the novelist contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. Ah, my fingers itch to be ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... but was performed in accordance with a special order or direction of the court, given, probably, in most cases, verbally to the sheriff. After execution, the body of the felon was taken from the gallows and hung upon a gibbet conveniently near the place where the fact was committed, there to remain, until, from the action of the elements, or the ravages of birds of prey, it disappeared. Of the object of this ghastly feature of capital punishment it is alleged, ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... of Saint Andrew, as I writ, was the Mortimer hanged, without defence by him made (he had allowed none to Sir Hugh Le Despenser and my Lord of Kent): and four days hung his body in irons on the gibbet, as Sir Hugh's the father had done. Verily, as he had done, so did God apay him, which is just Judge over all ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... came the prentice carpenter whose voice Hath shaken kingdoms down, whose menial gibbet Rises triumphant o'er the wreck of Empires And stretches out ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley here—just two ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... furnished the types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Judas. We were all three seized and handed over to the Mexican agents. Bound hand and foot, under an escort of thirty men, the next morning we set off to cross the deserts and prairies of Sonora, to gain the Mexican capital, where we well knew that a gibbet was ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... devise with themselves of our death, and how they might be revenged; divers was the opinions of this divers number: the first said, that hee thought best the Mayd should be burned alive: the second said she should be throwne out to wild beasts: the third said, she should be hanged upon a gibbet: the fourth said she should be flead alive: thus was the death of the poore Maiden scanned betweene them foure. But one of the theeves after every man had declared his judgement, did speake in this manner: it is not convenient unto the oath of our company, to suffer you to waxe more cruell then ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... hard, as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may be ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... it, by all my efforts as a writer, by all my words and all my votes as a legislator! I declare it before the crucifix; before that Victim of the penalty of death, who sees and hears us; before that gibbet, in which, two thousand years ago, for the eternal instruction of the generations, the human law ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or doing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... favour, but James, to his credit, was deaf to them all. Bacon, in his character of attorney-general, prosecuted the prisoner to conviction; and he died the felon's death on the 29th of June, 1612, on a gibbet erected in front of the gate of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; death for ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular that you can—what advantage ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... night, when mounted on my mare, To Bagshot Heath I did repair, And saw Will Davies hanging there, Upon the gibbet bleak and bare, With a rustified, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... round, like open presses, That shaw'd the Dead in their last dresses; And (by some devilish cantraip sleight) Each in its cauld hand held a light. By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gabudid gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted: Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had strangled: A knife, a father's throat had mangled. Whom ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! - I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Bank of England. He receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since civilization dawned ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... I shall certainly spare no efforts in taking him that way, and would far rather he met his fate on a gibbet than by a bullet from ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... The gibbet, indeed, certainly disables those who die upon it from infesting the community; but their death seems not to contribute more to the reformation of their associates, than any other method of separation. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... cover is a full-length figure of Hope, with dark hair, dressed in a red dress with large falling collar, having a blue flower at the point. In her left hand she holds an anchor. In the distant background is a cottage and a gibbet on a hill, the sun with rays just appearing under a cloud. On the hilly foreground is a red lily, and further afield a caterpillar and a strawberry plant. On the lower cover is a full-length figure of Faith, with fair hair, dressed in a blue dress with large falling collar, having a red flower at ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... have been by no means teachable birds, for during the years the Spaniards had ruled in Holland, the places of execution were never empty. They were screeching as if in anger, but still remained perched on the tree, which they probably mistook for a gibbet. The rest of the comical ornaments and the thought of the nimble adventurer, who must have climbed up to fasten them, formed a glaring and offensive contrast to the caricature ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... asked whether he would rather have his answer from their mouths or from their masters'. On Macbeth desiring to see the masters, witch No. 1 directed that the blood of a sow that had eaten her nine farrow, and grease that had been sweaten from the murderer's gibbet, should be thrown into the flame. Accompanied by a clap of thunder, an armed head rose, and admonished Macbeth to beware of Macduff. Another demon, more potent, in the shape of a bloody child, rose and bade Macbeth be courageous; to laugh ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... chances and training of the individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... brings to light, life and immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment as is the curse and wrath of God; ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... carrying but a few worthless quartz diamonds and a little sham gold. Then Roberval, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in his vast and many-titled domain, for another season of snows and famine, freely using the lash and gibbet to keep his penal colonists in subjection; and then, according to some authorities, supported by the absence of Carder's name from the local records of St. Malo for a few months, Cartier was sent out to bring the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... pieces and the fragments flung into the air. Then the medals and decorations were rent from the image and trampled underfoot. Finally the image itself was struck a blow that toppled it over into the dust. The hangman now took it in hand, tied a rope round its neck, and dragged it to a gibbet, on which it was hung. The affair ended in the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... aisy thing to know your haunts; but I'll set them upon your trail that will find you out if you were to hide yourself in the bowels of the earth, for the words you used to me this night. Dar manim, I will never rest either night or day until I see you swing from a gibbet." ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... shame to say! They were seized from behind, their arms bound behind their backs, and, in spite of their protests, led out on the watch tower, where was a permanent gibbet, and, in sight of all their comrades, hung over ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... God! that ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... company. Two hours afterwards Hardress himself arrived in a fit of compunction. On learning that they had departed, he swore to himself that if this his servant exceeded his views, he would tear his flesh from his bones, and gibbet him as a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... me see, what is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. Go and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... given to the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels as those ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... reason: thinkest thou I'll endanger my soul gratis? At a word, hang no more about 15 me, I am no gibbet for you. Go. A short knife and a throng!—To your manor of Pickt-hatch! Go. You'll not bear a letter for me, you rogue! you stand upon your honour! Why, thou unconfinable baseness, it is as much as I can do ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... this, the Salvation Army instinctively grasps the central truth of Christianity and discards its central superstition: that central truth being the vanity of revenge and punishment, and that central superstition the salvation of the world by the gibbet. ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... the brightly labelled casks of sake and shoyu (sauce) waiting in the darkness like the deputation of a friendly society in its insignia of office: the silent jars of tea, greenish in colour and ticketed with strange characters, the names of the respective tea-gardens: the iron kettle hanging on gibbet chains from the top of the ceiling over a charcoal fire sunk in the floor; the tasteful design of the commonest earthenware bowl: the little board and chopper for slicing the raw fish: the clean white rice-tubs with their ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... unlikeness to the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it tears the veil from each hostile ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... hard and living piece of work. The one seemed to blaze new pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... afterwards I received one duck by the hands of Maquin, a sort of Indian Flibberty-gibbet: this lad is a hunchbacked dwarf, very shrewd, but a perfect imp; his delight seems to be tormenting the brown babies in the wigwam, or teazing the meek deer-hounds. He speaks English very fluently, and writes tolerably for an Indian boy; he usually accompanies the women in their visits, and acts ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon—the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... dirl.— Coffins stood round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, to think of. The terrible descriptions ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... no use talking like that," the Jew said quietly. "We are useful to each other. I have saved your life from the gibbet, you have done the work I required. Between us, it is worse than childish to threaten in the present matter. I do not doubt that you will do your business well, and you know that you will be well paid for it; what can ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... ridges in the Maurette group, the culminating point being Mt. Fenouillet, 981 ft., at the western extremity. The path to it, which skirts the whole ridge, commences at the back of the castle, just under the peak of La Potence, 633 ft., on which is a fragment of a tower. Agibbet for the execution of malefactors stood there, hence the name. The small hill above the east end of Hyres, and standing between the old and new cemeteries, is a favourite walk, and commands a good view. Before descending from the castle observe the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... hanged in New York, he is walked out of one of these cells, without any condemned sermon or other religious formalities, straight into the narrow jail-yard, which may be about the width of Cranbourn Alley. There, a gibbet is erected, which is of curious construction; for the culprit stands on the earth with the rope about his neck, which passes through a pulley in the top of the 'Tree' (see Newgate Calendar passim), and is attached to a weight something heavier than the man. This weight, being suddenly ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Goods, if we are so mad as to call for them? Would you have them hinder your buying their Commodities? Or, to go a little further, would we be hinder'd if they did? If we cut our own Throats, in our own wise Judgments, would you have them make a Law to gibbet us for it after we are dead? I allow you many of our Murmurings are just; but for the Love of Truth and Goodness, let us lament our Case with some Sense, and begin at the right End with railing at ourselves. I do not deny, that we are much impoverish'd by their ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... evidence, however improbable it might be, to substantiate the offence, I should hardly have regarded the Judge with less reverence because he pronounced sentence of death upon the unhappy victims of superstition, and sent them to the stake, or the gibbet. But they resolutely persisted in asserting their innocence, and there was not only no evidence against them which ought to have weighed in the mind of any reasonable man who believed in witchcraft, but during the trial the imposture practised by the prosecutors ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... criminal is to be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused eighty women ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... prate less priggishly about honor because it is no longer a word with a single meaning." He paused a moment, then went on in a climax of vehemence. "From this moment on your New England code and my inherited chivalry may be hanged on the same gibbet! This revered temple of your marriage is just as sacred to me as a joss house—and I mean to invade it—and break its false idols—if ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and power could never verify the cheat of Perkin; and if the latter was astonishingly adroit, the king was ridiculously clumsy. 6. Perkin himself confessed his imposture more than once, and read his confession to the people, and renewed his confession at the foot of the gibbet on which he was executed.—Answer. I have shown that this confession was such an aukward forgery that lord Bacon did not dare to quote or adhere to it, but invented a new story, more specious, but ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... my Lord; the rogues are fat as butter! There is hope of a little rest for the innocents, since business calls me to the Lust in Rust. There should be a law, Lord Governor, to gibbet the black that ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... to the occasion, and directed several of his nobles to forcibly drag the Earl of March from the apartments of the guilty pair, and in 1330 he became the Earl of Double-Quick March—a sort of forced March—towards the gibbet, where he was last seen trying to stand on the English climate. The queen was kept in close confinement during the rest of her life, and the morning papers of that time contained nothing of a social nature regarding ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... were employed. I had recourse again to my telescope, when I found that two of our officers, one a general, the other a colonel, with whom I spent the preceding evening, and who went out into the enemy's camp about midnight as spies, were taken, and then were actually going to be executed on a gibbet. I found the distance too great to throw the shell with my hand, but most fortunately recollecting that I had the very sling in my pocket which assisted David in slaying Goliath, I placed the shell in it, and immediately threw it in the midst of them: it burst as it ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... Lance. "So many fathoms from a certain tree with arms like a gibbet, on a line with a stone on which is scratched the outline of a skull. Then dig straight ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... crucified. Stayros the vile engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape —that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros after him ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... bodies of Pizarro and his faithful adherents were left weltering in their blood. Some were for dragging forth the governor's corpse to the market-place, and fixing his head upon a gibbet. But Almagro was secretly prevailed on to grant the entreaties of Pizarro's friends, and allow his interment. This was stealthily and hastily performed, in the fear of momentary interruption. A faithful attendant and his wife, with a few black domestics, wrapped ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... their host as far as the banks of the Rhine, returned to Paris, to receive the applause of his sovereign, and the ensigns of the consulship for the ensuing year. The triumph of the Romans was indeed sullied by their treatment of the captive king, whom they hung on a gibbet, without the knowledge of their indignant general. This disgraceful act of cruelty, which might be imputed to the fury of the troops, was followed by the deliberate murder of Withicab, the son of Vadomair; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... as he promised, but though his money was taken there was no good result. At length the day arrived when the executions were to take place. A stage was erected with a gibbet on it and huge casks of water. Below, on the solid ground, stakes with chains were driven into the ground; while near the gibbet was a post with a chain in which those who were to be mercifully strangled before being thrown into the flames were to be placed. It was a fearful-looking ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... fly—the grand vizier! the pasha of three tails! O'er the horizon's bounding hills, where distant vision fails, All stealthily, with eyes on earth, and shrinking from the sight, As a nocturnal robber holds his dark and breathless flight, And thinks he sees the gibbet spread its arms in solemn wrath, In every tree that dimly throws ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... the castle with him! To the castle! He will lodge to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... where salt is found; with rivers without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond—such is a great part of Galicia, ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... by jury had, of course, been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, all those present believing it would be a great pleasure even to himself; but ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... a name for our frightful play? There is a wharf in London that is known as Wapping. In these days that we call the present it has sunk to common use and its rotten timbers are piled with honest unromantic merchandise. But once a gibbet stood on Wapping Wharf, and pirates were hanged upon it. It was the first convenient harborage for inbound ships to dispose of this dirty deep-sea cargo. So it was the somber motif of a pirate's life—his moment of reflection after he had slit his ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... my Lord, make haste unto me; but as soon as his Lordship came, she expired in his arms, resigning her precious soul into the hands of Almighty God. The cruel wretch her husband was shot by the pursuers; too good a death for one who deserved the gibbet; and the lady was universally lamented by all tender and religious people. And this tragical relation I have mentioned, upon the account of that impulse, or dream, that the clergyman had at the fatal ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... pit in which his gibbet stood is on the crest of a circular 'knowe,' or hummock, on the east side of the Ballachulish Hotel, overlooking the ferry across the narrows, where the tide runs like a ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... thought a knave, or fool, Or bigot, plotting crime, Who, for the advancement of his kind, Is wiser than his time. For him the hemlock shall distil; For him the axe be bared; For him the gibbet shall be built; For him the stake prepared. Him shall the scorn and wrath of men Pursue with deadly aim; And malice, envy, spite, and lies, Shall desecrate his name. But Truth shall conquer at the last, For round and round we run; And ever the Right comes uppermost, And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... raised his white handkerchief. Immediately the old Captain was seized by Cossacks and dragged to the gibbet. Astride the cross-beam of the gallows, sat the mutilated Bashkirs who we had questioned; he held a rope in his hand, and I saw, an instant after, poor Ivan Mironoff suspended in the air. Then Ignatius was ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... service, He acquired, or more properly created, A Ministerial Estate: He was the only person of his time Who could cheat without the mask of honesty, Retain his primeval meanness When possessed of ten thousand a year: And having daily deserved the gibbet for what he did, Was at last condemned for what he could not do. Oh! indignant reader! Think not his life useless to mankind! Providence connived at his execrable designs, To give to after ages A conspicuous proof ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... round. Oi'll go and ask tonight how that Methurdy chap, the blacksmith, be a feeling. Oi reckon he's at the bottom on it. Dang un for a mischievous rogue! Varley would ha' been quiet enough without him. Oi be wrong if oi shan't see him dangling from a gibbet one of these days, and a good ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... Rushbrook was evidently stupefied from excess of feeling; first, the strong excitement which had urged him to the deed; and now from the reaction the prostration of mental power which had succeeded it. Jane dreaded the present and the future—whichever way she turned her eyes the gibbet was before her—the clanking of chains in her ears; in her vision of the future, scorn, misery, and remorse—she felt only for her husband. Joey, poor boy, he felt for both. Even the dog showed, as he looked up into Joey's face, that he was aware that a foul deed had been done. ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... his public opinion. The public opinion that operated on Bishop, the murderer, was the opinion of the Burkers, his comrades. Did that condemn him? No! He knew no other public opinion till he came to be hanged, and caught the loathing eyes, and heard the hissing execrations of the crowd below his gibbet.) So, also, the public opinion of the great is the opinion of their equals,—of those whom birth and accident cast for ever in their way. This distinction is full of important practical deductions; it is one which, more than most maxims, should never be forgotten by a politician ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Do you? None, I believe, ever thought that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken this fancy to me,—the strong sympathize with the strong. You, too, could ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for her share. It is observable, that Shakespeare, on this great occasion, which involves the fate of a king, multiplies all the circumstances of horrour. The babe, whose finger is used, must be strangled in its birth; the grease must not only be human, but must have dropped from a gibbet, the gibbet of a murderer; and even the sow, whose blood is used, must have offended nature by devouring her own farrow. These are ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... imagine it possible that any one could sink so low as to earn his living by watching his fellow-creatures, spying their every act, and then betraying them for the sake of a few dirty shillings, to send them to prison or to the gibbet? There can be nothing on earth so base as a thing like this. Why, a footpad is a nobleman ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... confined to the older Church. Protestantism was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... punished with awful severity. Some were whipped to death. Some were mutilated and exiled to Siberia, and many perished on the scaffold. Fifteen officers of high rank were placed together beneath the gibbet, with ropes around their necks. As the drop fell, the rope of one broke, and he fell to the ground. Bruised and half stunned he rose upon his knees, and looking ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Curfew, when the Froom's mild hiss Reigned sole, undulled by whirr of merchandize, From Pummery-Tout to where the Gibbet is, ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... "Poems on Man," (Which contain many verses as fine, by the bye, As any that lately came under my eye,) Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it, Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it; As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit 440 The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet; Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column, Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn, By way of displaying his critical crosses, And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis, His broadsides resulting (this last there's no doubt of) In successively ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... sinking from under their feet, the miserable men were launched into eternity. A barge was then brought alongside, into which the bodies were lowered, and carried to Fort Ricasoli, at the entrance of the great harbour. Four of the bodies, being sewn up in tarred canvas, were hung in chains to a lofty gibbet; while two were buried beneath it. For many long months afterwards the four pirates hung there,—a terrible and disgusting sight, and an awful warning to all who might be inclined to pursue the ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... all 3. In the tyme of Charles the great their was on that had a great wogue of learning and wisdome, to which man the King concredited his sone the Prince. One of the Princes attendants was taken in a roobery and condemned to the gibbet: the Prince and his master begged his life, and so saved him. To try the 2d byword, the master took his pupill the Prince to the Soan to bath, having bathed, he put him wtin a mil wt strait orders not to stir from that til he called for him. He comes home ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... a man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fastened to his leg, leaps on the breech of one of the Bellerophon's guns, spy-glass in hand. "By gar, mon Empereur," says Count Bertrand, "dey have erect von prospect for you." The "prospect" is far from encouraging—a fort with the English flag flying from the central tower, and a gibbet erected in front of it. No wonder that the emperor expresses himself dissatisfied with a "prospect" of so lugubrious a character. An English sailor seated on a neighbouring gun, delivers the sentiments of the day after the plain-spoken fashion of his countrymen. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Brederode, and furnished occupation as well for secret correspondents and spies as for the most dignified functionaries of Government. Capons or sausages on Good Friday, the Psalms of Clement Marot, the Sermon on the Mount in the vernacular, led to the rack, the gibbet, and the stake, but ushered in a war against the inquisition which was to last for eighty years. Brederode was not to be the hero of that party which he disgraced by his buffoonery. Had he lived, he might, perhaps, like many of his confederates, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... changed her first patron;[1] wherefore will he always make her sorrowful with his art. And were it not that at the passage of the Arno some semblance of him yet remains, those citizens who afterwards rebuilt it upon the ashes that were left by Attila[2] would have labored in vain. I made a gibbet for ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... cause, has ever once been seriously attempted. Laws of the most sanguinary and unconstitutional nature have been enacted; the country has been disgraced and exasperated by frequent and bloody executions; and the gibbet, that perpetual resource of weak and cruel legislators, has groaned under the multitude of starving criminals; yet, while the cause is suffered to exist, the effects will ever follow. The amputation of limbs will never eradicate a prurient humour, which ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... of quiet compulsion and conciliation to which Elizabeth had trusted for the religious reunion of her subjects was foiled; and the English Catholics, fined, imprisoned at every crisis of national danger, and deprived of their teachers by the prison and the gibbet, were severed more hopelessly than ever from the national Church. A fresh impulse was thus given to the growing current of opinion which was to bring England at last to recognize the right of every man to freedom ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... morning air. The mirth went heavily to our hearts. The snatch of song, the unrestrained laugh, the merry glee, broke upon the ear of the wayfarers like the mocking of demons. The consciousness that they then sped, without a beacon or a guide, over the flinty path of flight, to end perhaps at the gibbet, imparted to the voice of mirth the sound of ingratitude. However, the day was brilliant; above us the clear, blue, unfathomable sky; around us the bracing mountain air, laden with the breath of hare-bell and ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... fines, which became productive of great abuse in later times, was moderately apportioned to offences in the time of Solon, partly from the high price of money, but partly, also, from the wise moderation of the lawgiver. The last grave penalty of death was of various kinds, as the cross, the gibbet, the precipice, the bowl—afflictions seldom in reserve for ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rescue from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim and ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... was held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after the first swinging, certain ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Nancy; "we have met with Christians at last. When men speak of the gibbet, I know that they have served the Lord and will fight the devil. To-night you have fought four devils instead of one, and like angels ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... apart from Fenianism, and it showed that a moral, a peaceable, a virtuous, a religious people, moved by the most virtuous and religious instincts, felt themselves coerced to execrate as a cowardly and revolting crime the act of state policy consummated on the Manchester gibbet. In fine, the country was up in moral revolt against a deed which the perpetrators themselves already felt to be of evil character, and one which they fain would blot for ever from ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... Inspiration of a MAHOMET in your hands, and such a terrestrial Doggery at your heels. Suppose the bitterest of your barking curs were a Reverend Desfontaines of Sodom, whom you yourself had saved from the gibbet once, and again and again from starving? It is positively a great Anarchy, and Fountain of Anarchies, all that, if you will consider; and it will have results under the sun. You cannot help it, say you; there is no shutting up of a Reverend Desfontaines, which ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... man who should bring you the head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the less dear to Florence because they were less renowned; ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with him, there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, 'who,' as he said, 'were then hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet!' and, upon that, he said, 'he could not wonder enough how it came to pass that, since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left, who were still robbing in all places.' Upon this, I (who took ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... at the shame of them, Poster-Pan, Poltroons of the pigeon-liver. Your placards gibbet them, Poster-Pan, Who crowd like curs in the cowardly crush, Who flock like sheep in the brainless rush With ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... Captain Church, "he got many a penny by it." We would gladly doubt the statement, if we could, that the head of this ill-fated chief was sent to Plymouth, where it was for a long time exposed on a gibbet. The four quarters of the mangled body were hung upon four trees, and there they remained swinging in the moaning wind until the elements wasted ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... of the night? - Cannon and scaffold and sword, Horror of gibbet and cord, Mowed us as sheaves for the grave, Mowed us down for the right. We do not grudge or repent. Freely to freedom we gave Pledges, till life should ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of both rooms were hung with drawings of masterly excellence. A portfolio was filled with sketches of equal skill,—but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,—the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the place for public executions. The gibbet stone was at the east end of the Market. It consisted of a mass of solid sandstone, with a quadrangular hole in the middle, which served as a socket for the gallows. Most of the Covenanters who were executed for conscience' sake in the reigns of Charles II. and James II. ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... right in considering the lucubrations of the poet Baudelaire, and his necrophile imagination of his own carrion hung on a gibbet and devoured by vultures, as a mixture of sadism and masochism. He sought out the most repulsive women of all races, Chinese, negresses, dwarfs, giants, or modern women as artificial as possible, to satisfy his pathological instinct. The following case quoted by Krafft-Ebing ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... A Laird and Twenty Pence,[27] pronounc'd with Noise, When constru'd, but for a plain Yeoman go, And a good sober Two-pence, and well so. Hence then,'you Proud Imposters, get you gone, You Picts in Gentry and Devotion, You Scandal to the Stock of Verse, a Race Able to bring the Gibbet in Disgrace. Hyperbolus by suffering did traduce The Ostracism, and sham'd it out of Use. The Indian that Heaven did forswear Because he heard some Spaniards were there. Had he but known what Scots in Hell had been, He would, Erasmus-like, have hung between. ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... always be the promptest, always the first to discover the dead animal, always the last to beat a retreat when nothing more remains than a heap of little bones bleached by the sun. How does the vagabond, passing at a distance, know that, up there, invisible, high on the gibbet, there is something worth going for? The others, the real knackers, wait for the meat to go bad; they are informed by the strength of the effluvia. The ant, gifted with greater powers of scent, hurries up before there is any stench at all. But, when the meat, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... by train and motor, getting off at stations unexpectedly, hopping into trains going in any direction but the right one, sleeping in strange beds and doing all manner of queer things. And here we are at last. I am sure you must look upon me as a very silly, flibberty-gibbet creature." ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... building, which was about three stories high, and endeavored to see what there was about it which had once arrested my attention, and came to the conclusion that it was its exceptional situation on the dock, and the ghostly effect of the hoisting-beam projecting from the upper story like a gibbet. And yet this beam was common to many a warehouse in the vicinity, though in none of them were there any such signs of life as proceeded from the curious mixture of sail loft, boat shop and drinking saloon, now before me. Could it be that the ban of criminality was upon the house, ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... an incarnation of the people, and of modern democracy itself. The great work of emancipation had to be sealed, therefore, with the blood of the just, even as it was inaugurated with the blood of the just. The tragic history of the abolition of slavery, which opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close with ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... was a zealous old Zibet, Toboggans he tried to prohibit. If any one tried To take a sly slide, He ordered him hanged on a gibbet. ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... but which our indignation at your second attempt upon Don Rebiera induces us to offer; for if you escape from him you will have to do with me. On the whole, Don Silvio, you may think yourself fortunate, for it is better to die by the hands of a gentleman than by the gibbet." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... "They're a nice lot, ain't they? You say this cruise is bungled. Ah! by gum, if you could understand how bad it's bungled, you would see! We're that near the gibbet that my neck's stiff with thinking on it. You've seen 'em, maybe, hanged in chains, birds about 'em, seamen p'inting 'em out as they go down with the tide. 'Who's that?' says one. 'That! Why, that's John Silver. I knowed him well,' says another. And you can hear the chains a-jangle as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the banditti, "Nature's own hand has marked you out for an assassin—come, prithee be frank, and tell us how thou hast contrived so long to escape the gibbet? In what gaol didst thou leave thy last fetters? Or from what galley hast thou taken thy departure, without ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... of the individual man. Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... may lighten and storm, Till it hunt the red worm From the grass where the gibbet is driven; But it can't hurt the dead, And it won't save the head That is doom'd ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... way of duel, shall suffer death by hanging; and if he were the challenger, his body, after death, shall be gibbeted.* He who removeth it from the gibbet, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor; and the officer shall see ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... aroused against a sect of Hellenist Jews who openly proclaimed that the Law had been abrogated in advance by their Master, who, as Saul observed with horror, had incurred the curse of the Law by dying on a gibbet. All the Pharisee in him was revolted; and he led the savage heretic-hunt which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... executioner [4], as I guess it will turn out; they'll be so pinking you with goads, as you carry your gibbet [5] along the streets one day, as soon as ever the ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... guilty. It does not appear that witnesses were examined. The juries spoke from their personal knowledge. Thus each convict was condemned on the oaths of thirty-six men. At first, on account of the multitude of executions, the condemned were beheaded: afterward they were hanged and left on the gibbet as objects of terror; but as their bodies were removed by their friends, the King ordered them to be hanged in chains, the first instance in which express mention of the practice is made. According to Holinshed the executions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... upon the face of a Negro baby. A black woman cries out to him, passing along, "God bless you, old man; I wish I could help you, but I cannot." The most ignominious death known to our laws awaits him. Already has the gibbet been erected. The sticks "standant and crossant" are in place, and the hungry rope is "pendant." A forty acre field is filled with those drawn together by this strange scene. Three thousand soldiers with loaded guns stand ready to repel any attempt at rescue. Well shotted cannon turn their open ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... sedition." Hence their sanguinary conflicts with the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... visibly; but none sees but themselves; for instance, if a man's fatal end be hanging, they will see a gibbet, or a rope about his neck: if beheaded, they will see the man without a head; if drowned, they will see water up to his throat; if unexpected death, they will see a winding sheet about his head: all which are represented to their view. ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... counsel. It is unknown whence or of what family she came, but for all that she saved Hugh's life, who had been made prisoner by Frantz of Lutzelbourg. He was to have been hanged that very day, and a gibbet had already been set up on the ramparts, when Huldine, at the head of her husband's vassals, whom she had armed and inspired with her own courage, bravely broke in, released Hugh, and hung Frantz ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... life and immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath—"A warnin to hall tirans—mind your ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... editor, and arrange for a meeting, which rendered it necessary to remind him that we were not in the England of fifty years ago, and that duelling was abolished, and that his traducer would not only refuse to fight, but denounce his challenger to the police and gibbet him in his paper. I pointed out, on the other hand, that the article was clearly libellous, and recommended Mr. Fortescue either to obtain a criminal information against the proprietor of the paper, or sue him ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed," I thought, "when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard's convoy on either hand to prop ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... looked up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; let me ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... duties of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed on gallows, were ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... authorship. This acquaintance continued for many years, and for many years I was a contributor to his paper. He was elected secretary of the Senate in 1843 by the Democratic Party. A little later I wrote an article called "Gibbet Hill" in which I attempted to present the tradition concerning the hill in Groton which bears that name. That article was printed in the Yeoman's Gazette or the Concord Freeman. For several years beginning about the year 1836, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... white handkerchief. Immediately the old Captain was seized by Cossacks and dragged to the gibbet. Astride the cross-beam of the gallows, sat the mutilated Bashkirs who we had questioned; he held a rope in his hand, and I saw, an instant after, poor Ivan Mironoff suspended in the air. Then Ignatius was ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... cut off your leg that was shot at Quebec and Saratoga," said the plucky and witty officer, "and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your body on a gibbet." ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the end," said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even sin ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... it be otherwise with those who may be called the outlaws of the human race? They did but justify the seeming paradox of the traveller's exclamation, who, when at length, after a dreary passage through the wilderness, he came in sight of a gibbet, returned thanks that he had now arrived at a civilized country. "The pastoral tribes," says the writer I have already quoted, "who were ignorant of the distinction of landed property, must have disregarded the use, as well as the abuse, of civil jurisprudence; and the skill of an eloquent ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... (Rabenstein), a translation of the German word for the gibbet, which in Germany and Switzerland is permanent, and made of stone." [Compare Werner, act ii. sc. 2. Compare, too, Anster's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... of the beneficial working of the later law? A blessing has been conferred on society, and in a manner highly creditable to the spirit of modern times; reform has been accomplished, not by persecution, not by the gibbet and the rack, but by justice and tolerance. The traveller has flung aside his cloak, not compelled by the angry buffeting of the north wind, but because the mild, benignant weather makes such a defence no longer necessary. The law no longer compels the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... to stand; To him he lost his lady-love, And to the King his land. Ourselves beheld the listed field, A sight both sad and fair; We saw Lord Marmion pierce the shield, And saw the saddle bare; We saw the victor win the crest He wears with worthy pride; And on the gibbet-tree, reversed, His foeman's scutcheon tied. Place, nobles, for the Falcon-Knight! Room, room, ye gentles gay, For him who conquered in the right, Marmion ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... do with us before. Why, we are at war, I tell you; and it is not we who declared it! They have made war on us now for the last twenty years and more. What of all the Catholics—priests and others—who have died on the gibbet, or rotted in prison? If her Grace makes war upon us, why should we not make war upon her Grace? ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... which was about three stories high, and endeavoured to see what there was about it which had once arrested my attention, and came to the conclusion that it was its exceptional situation on the dock, and the ghostly effect of the hoisting-beam projecting from the upper story like a gibbet. And yet this beam was common to many a warehouse in the vicinity, though in none of them were there any such signs of life as proceeded from the curious mixture of sail loft, boat shop, and drinking saloon, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... thereabouts); they were not far apart. The one was the Toll House, where all merchants or traders paid the charges in corn or kind due to the Baron; the other was the Court House, where he sat to administer justice and decide causes, or to send the criminal to the gibbet. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... to the alcayd[^e] of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted eight days is not dead." No sooner ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... courses of the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... talking like that," the Jew said quietly. "We are useful to each other. I have saved your life from the gibbet, you have done the work I required. Between us, it is worse than childish to threaten in the present matter. I do not doubt that you will do your business well, and you know that you will be well paid for it; what can either of ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... criminal pursuits that injure his country: which at the same time has been to him nothing more than a step-mother. In the paroxysm of his rage, in the exacerbation of his mind, he loses sight of his neighbour's rights, he overlooks the gibbet, he forgets the torture; his unruly desires have become too potent—they have completely absorbed his mind; by a criminal indulgence they have given an inveteracy to his habits which preclude him from changing them; laziness has made him torpid: remorse has gnawed his peace; despair ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... evening, Sancho Mendez was publicly hanged. Confessing the crime, he was carried to the rude gibbet at the far edge of the wheat field and paid the price in full. He had been tried by a jury of twelve; and there was absolutely no question as to his guilt. His companion, a lad named Dominic, callously betrayed by the older ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... stone; I was a Roman soldier of fortune; I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like flight of the pure child-mind to whom the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dreams," he muttered. "'S death, but he be more a king than Henry himself. God speed the day of his coronation, when, before the very eyes of the Plantagenet hound, a black cap shall be placed upon his head for a crown; beneath his feet the platform of a wooden gibbet for a throne." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation, everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated gibbet of Montfaucon,—the first mention of it in history, though it had been ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... order. Elizabeth wished her subjects would be content to live together in unity of spirit, if not in unity of theory, in the bond of peace, not hatred, in righteousness of life, not in orthodoxy preached by stake and gibbet. She was content to wait and to persevere. She refused to declare war. War would tear the world in pieces. She knew her danger. She knew that she was in constant peril of assassination. She knew that if the Protestants were crushed in Scotland, in ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... public and private affairs, the better for them. Therefore, in revolutions, as a body, they remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually, they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest them of the quibbles whereby these expounders—or confounders—of codes fatten on the credulity of States and the miseries of unfortunate ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... are making toward venality and corruption. We already hear the sounding title of Highness and Most Honorable trumpeted in our ears, which, ten years since, would have exalted a man to a station as high as Haman's gibbet." Page of Virginia was ablaze with indignation. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "What, authorize in a free republic, by law, too, by your first act, the exertion of a dangerous royal prerogative in your Chief Magistrate!" Gerry, in remarks whose oblique criticism upon arrangements at the President's ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... whom he receives his pay, is not likely to be trusted by us. I know your character, that is sufficient. Now, although the government make no difference between one party or the other, with the exception that some may be honoured with the axe instead of the gibbet, you will observe what we do: and as our lives are already forfeited by attainder, we make no scruple of putting out of the way any one whom we may even suspect of betraying us. Nay, more; we can furnish the government with sufficient proofs against you without any risk to ourselves, for we have ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... CHAINS. A vile, desperate fellow. Persons guilty of murder, or other atrocious crimes, are frequently, after execution, hanged on a gibbet, to which they are fastened by iron bandages; the gibbet is commonly placed on or near the place ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... great kettle, or caldron, which, as fast as it grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon's blood. To these they poured in the blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they bound the infernal spirit to answer ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... strange tongue; and I found out later that this was Picardy, a village where the French weavers wrought for the Linen Company. Here I got a fresh direction for Pilrig, my destination; and a little beyond, on the wayside, came by a gibbet and two men hanged in chains. They were dipped in tar, as the manner is; the wind span them, the chains clattered, and the birds hung about the uncanny jumping-jacks and cried. The sight coming on me suddenly, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... delivered up to Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods upon the ploughshare, and fell back again ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... from the curious method adopted for their publication. Others declare that he suffered punishment in a funereal chamber draped with black; while another authority declares that the poet, the victim of his own satires, was hung on a fork-shaped gibbet, not on account of his abuse of Pius IV., but through the hatred of Pius V., which some personal quarrel had excited. This conjecture is, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... attained. "Cortez and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the largest not over one hundred tons and some were ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... furnished occupation as well for secret correspondents and spies as for the most dignified functionaries of Government. Capons or sausages on Good Friday, the Psalms of Clement Marot, the Sermon on the Mount in the vernacular, led to the rack, the gibbet, and the stake, but ushered in a war against the inquisition which was to last for eighty years. Brederode was not to be the hero of that party which he disgraced by his buffoonery. Had he lived, he might, perhaps, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy, and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian society—especially its women—towards a woman who, after being seduced by a ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... principles, and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet. (1) Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will suffer the penalty for his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Jim said "She's a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or doing something useful, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... prisoner. But the sentence had hardly been carried out when the temper of the mob appeared to change. Stones were thrown, angry cries were raised, and the mob, as if animated by a common purpose, began to press around the scaffold. One man leaped upon the gibbet and cut the rope by which the body was suspended; others gathered round as if to carry off the body. Then it is asserted that Porteous completely lost his head. The passion that had been swaying him all day entirely overmastered him. He is said to have snatched ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... dead—dead on the gibbet. He was hanged for piracy at Port Royal, Jamaica. Jack," said Nanny, seizing my hand, and pressing it in her long fingers, "this is a secret; recollect, a secret deep as the grave; promise me, as ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... not exceed it," replied Solomon Eagle. "Lift a finger against either of these young persons, and I will reveal all. Yes," he continued, menacingly, "I will disclose such dreadful things against you, that you will assuredly be adjudged to a gibbet higher than the highest tower of this ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... by way of stimulation, a man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only in political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of ampler wing that knows no line—is at home in the open or in the woods. His sonorous voice has a human sound that is uncanny; his form is visible afar in the desert and sinister as a gibbet; his plumage fits in with nothing but the night, which he does not love. This evil genius of the land is the Raven of the north. Its numbers increased as we reached the Barrens, and the morning ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered,—like an unhooped cask upon a pole,—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It was said to grow only beneath a murderer's gibbet, and when torn from the earth by its root to utter a shriek which none might hear and live. From earliest times, in the East, a notion prevailed that the mandrake would remove sterility. With which purpose in view, Rachel said to Leah: "Give ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... "Ye dinna say so? God's santie! man, but this is grewsome, and gars the flesh creep on one's banes. Let his foul carcase be taen awa', and hangit on a gibbet on the hill where Malkin Tower aince stood, as a warning to a' ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... at Paris must needs know the Greve, The fatal retreat of th' unfortunate brave; Where honour and justice most oddly contribute To ease hero's pains by a halter and gibbet (PRIOR).] ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... dead could never shed its hallowed spirit of peace again if once it had been outraged with the indignities of a gibbet! If once it bore, instead of its own sweetly wholesome produce, that debased fruit of the gallows tree, its dignity would be forever broken! There in the flooding moonlight of the white-and-blue night it was protesting ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... book she was reading. Beyond, through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... it rather odd that Holland should be the only "mister" of the party, and I said to myself, as Gibbet said when he heard that "Aimwell" had gone to church, "That looks suspicions" (act ii. sc. 2).—James Smith, Memoirs, Letters, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... De Soto passed a high gibbet upon which three malefactors were hung in chains, swaying in the breeze. That revolting spectacle revealed the sad truth that in Peru, as well as elsewhere, man's fallen nature developed itself in crime and woe. The Emperor had also a large standing ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As to Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his glory ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... was written down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology so that only those possessing the key could read it aright. This was made necessary in order to avoid the persecutions of the theologians of the Middle Ages, who fought the Secret Doctrine with fire and sword; stake, gibbet and cross. Even to this day there will be found but few reliable books on the Hermetic Philosophy, although there are countless references to it in many books written on various phases of Occultism. And yet, the Hermetic Philosophy is the only Master Key which ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... John Wilson jeered at Robinson on his way to meet his death, and reviled him as he stood beneath the gibbet, over the hole that was his grave; but even the savage Endicott knew well that all the trainbands of the colony could not have guarded Christison to the gallows from the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings and ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... We had not travelled long, ere some mischance Disjoined me from my comrade; and, through fear Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom, where in former times 235 A murderer had been hung in iron chains. The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. 240 The monumental letters were ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men: his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... This celebrated gibbet was, in the memory of the last generation, still standing at the western end of the town of Crieff, in Perthshire. Why it was called the kind gallows we are unable to inform the reader with certainty; but it is alleged that the Highlanders used to touch their bonnets as they passed ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... also arise and difficulties spring up. In this land, the enemies of religion, have not power to kill and destroy the faithful; but they have power to pour contempt upon them. Cruel mockings may severely try those who fear neither the gibbet, nor the stake. These do try the people of God ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been so often baffled by the outcome. Among the many such cases known to us during this time there is no mention of a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the Restoration had maintained a very even pace—a stray conviction now and then among many acquittals—the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... that in Cheapside there had been but a little before a gibbet set up, and the picture of Huson hung upon it in the middle of the street. [John Hewson, who had been a shoemaker, became a Colonel in the Parliament Army, and sat in judgement on the King: he escaped hanging by flight, and died in 1662 at Amsterdam.] ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... of a poor province A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man," And a new chapter of history opened, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is to be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused eighty women to be hanged, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... once been seen here. A partial darkness obscured one end, across which, as for deeper mystery, an old russet curtain was drawn, by way of screen to a sombre band of winter cloaks, pendent each from its pin, like a malefactor from his gibbet. From amongst these cloaks, and behind that curtain, the Nun was said to issue. I did not believe this, nor was I troubled by apprehension thereof; but I saw a very dark and large rat, with a long ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of his which was taking him there. He would go because there was no one else on the country side that would dare. But I had no pride of that sort. I was quite of the same way of thinking as the others, and would as soon have thought of passing my night at Jacob's gibbet on Ditchling Common as in the haunted house of Cliffe Royal. Still, I could not bring myself to desert Jim; and so, as I say, I slunk about the house with so pale and peaky a face that my dear mother would have it that I had been at the ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it. His subjects cut up by his subjects were only capers to his leg of mutton. From none of his palaces and parks was there any view so rural, so composing to his spirits, as the shambles. When these were not fresh, the gibbet would do. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and Secunda, three virgins of Tuburga, had gall and vinegar given them to drink, were then severely scourged, tormented on a gibbet, rubbed with lime, scorched on a gridiron, worried by wild beasts, and at ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... this, who is for independence, and who is not? Those who are for it, will support it, and the remainder will undoubtedly see the reasonableness of paying the charges; while those who oppose or seek to betray it, must expect the more rigid fate of the jail and the gibbet. There is a bastard kind of generosity, which being extended to all men, is as fatal to society, on one hand, as the want of true generosity is on the other. A lax manner of administering justice, falsely termed moderation, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... freedom, each of which he would turn to abuse, must be taught, by external force, and from motives of fear, to counterfeit those effects of innocence, and of duty, to which he is not disposed: he must be referred to the whip, or the gibbet, for arguments in support of a caution, which the state now requires him to assume, on a supposition that he is insensible to the motives which recommend ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... about the island in idleness, take these hundred reals now, and some time of the day to-morrow quit the island under sentence of banishment for ten years, and under pain of completing it in another life if you violate the sentence, for I'll hang you on a gibbet, or at least the hangman will by my orders; not a word from either of you, or I'll make him feel ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... I hate wild winter's spite — The gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave — Why should I ache, the season's slave? I'll sing from the top of the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... lash from the tongue was enough. Now, can you imagine it possible that any one could sink so low as to earn his living by watching his fellow-creatures, spying their every act, and then betraying them for the sake of a few dirty shillings, to send them to prison or to the gibbet? There can be nothing on earth so base as a thing like this. Why, a footpad is ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... committed to the Tower. That they were not also hung was, according to the mild and merciful Dr. Reeves, Dean of Westminster, "a main cause of God's punishing the land" in the future time. For those destined to suffer, a gibbet was erected at Charing Cross, that the traitors might in their last moments see the spot where the late king had been executed. Having been half hung, they were taken down, when their heads were severed from their ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... without malice, and with a light heart, and I never love a man better than when I have put my scant of wind collar about his neck, to dub him Knight of the order of Saint Patibularius [patibulum, a gibbet], as the Provost's Chaplain, the worthy Father Vaconeldiablo [possibly Baco (Bacchus) el Diablo (the Devil)], is wont to call the Patron Saint ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... some one deserving of death.' So he gave him one that was likest to Alaeddin and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmed ed Denef and Ali ez Zibec of Cairo. Now they had brought Alaeddin to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmed ed Denef came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, 'Give me room to do my office.' 'O accursed one,' replied Ahmed, 'take this man and hang him in Alaeddin's stead; for he is innocent and we will ransom him with ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... brother (his family of course included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular that ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... in the cottage! Rushbrook was evidently stupefied from excess of feeling; first, the strong excitement which had urged him to the deed; and now from the reaction the prostration of mental power which had succeeded it. Jane dreaded the present and the future—whichever way she turned her eyes the gibbet was before her—the clanking of chains in her ears; in her vision of the future, scorn, misery, and remorse—she felt only for her husband. Joey, poor boy, he felt for both. Even the dog showed, as he looked ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; they had witnessed the rack and gibbet in constant operation; they were familiar with the sight of human heads decorating the posts of London Bridge or carried about on the pikes of soldiers. After witnessing such horrors free of cost, they would follow their queen and pay their ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... in herself, 'Why do I weary myself in vain? These two love and know each other and both are friends of my husband. Their desire is an honourable one and meseemeth it is pleasing to God, since the one of them hath scaped the gibbet and the other the lance-thrust and both the wild beasts of the wood; wherefore be it as they will.' Then, turning to the lovers, she said to them, 'If you have it still at heart to be man and wife, it is my pleasure also; be it so, and let the nuptials ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... gaolor, "Give us some one who deserveth death." So he gave him one that was likest of men to Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat; and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmad al-Danaf and Ali al-Zaybak of Cairo.[FN102] Now they had brought Ala al-Din to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmad al-Danaf came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, "Give me room to do my duty." He replied, "O accursed, take this man and hang him in Ala al-Din's stead; for he is innocent and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... scene, the plot breaks out in a fresh place. The man with the "gash," and Gipsy George are together, going over some youthful reminiscences. It seems that once upon a time there were six pirates; four were those pendents from the gibbet at Execution-Dock one hears so much about at the commencement; the fifth is the speaker, Gipsy George; and "you," exclaims that person, striking an attitude, and addressing Sir Gregory, "make up the half-dozen!" They all formerly did business in a ship called the "Morning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the noses of the landlords, which have bloomed and given place to another set of proboscises as germane us the old ones to the very welcome,—please to light—'Orses forward, and ready out. The skeleton at Barnby Moor has deserted his gibbet, and that is ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... place, the fleet came to anchor in Port St Julian on the 20th June, where they saw the gibbet still standing, on which Magellan had formerly executed some of his mutinous company. Here also Admiral Drake executed one Captain Doughty, the most suspected action of his life. Mr Doughty had been guilty of certain actions, tending towards contention ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... those castles where the seigneur was of "the religion." The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was hung on a gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the heart of the unhappy young king was broken by the guilt he had incurred. Charles ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... But Wendell Phillips, always an extremist among extremists, published an article entitled "Abraham Lincoln, the Slave-hound of Illinois," whereof the keynote was struck in this introductory sentence: "We gibbet a Northern hound to-day, side by side with the infamous Mason of Virginia." Mr. Garrison, a man of far larger and sounder intellectual powers than belonged to Phillips, did not fancy this sort of diatribe, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... hunger, as your charity began abroad it should end at home. A much less sum, a tithe of the bounty bestowed on Portugal, even if those men (which I cannot admit without enquiry) could not have been restored to their employments, would have rendered unnecessary the tender mercies of the bayonet and the gibbet. But doubtless our friends have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic relief; though never did such objects demand it. I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... had gone I kicked the hedge to pieces quickly, cut the twitch-ups at the butts and threw them with their wire nooses far into the thickets, and posted a warning in a cleft stick on the site of the last gibbet. Then I followed Wally to a second and third line of snares, which were treated in the same rough way, and watched him with curiously mingled feelings of detestation and amusement as he sneaked down ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... hundred years ago, when the Bible held the greatest sway over the human mind and Christianity was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the decree of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... as I writ, was the Mortimer hanged, without defence by him made (he had allowed none to Sir Hugh Le Despenser and my Lord of Kent): and four days hung his body in irons on the gibbet, as Sir Hugh's the father had done. Verily, as he had done, so did God apay him, which is just Judge ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... halberts, sheep-hooks, cardinals' hats, turbans, drums, gallipots, a gibbet, a cradle, a rack, a cart-wheel, an altar, a helmet, a back-piece, a breast-plate, a bell, a tub, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... was torn up, and a rope fastened round the neck of the corpse, which was then dragged through the streets by the infuriated mob; and the desecrated remains of the recently powerful favourite were hung by the feet to a gibbet, dismembered in the most brutal manner, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... and Scotland, and all the realms, castles, and lordships thereto pertaining, are proved guilty of high treason and lese majeste, and are thereby condemned to be divested of all symbols of nobility and knighthood, which you have disgraced; to be dragged on a hurdle to the common gibbet, and there hung by the neck till you are dead; your head to be cut off; your body quartered and exposed at the principal towns as a warning to the disaffected and the traitorous of all ranks in either nation, and this is to be done at whatsoever time the good pleasure of our sovereign ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... no place to him could be So lonely, but that thence might come a pang Brought from without to inward misery. 75 Now, as he plodded on, with sullen clang A sound of chains along the desert rang; He looked, and saw upon a gibbet high A human body that in irons swang, Uplifted by the tempest whirling by; 80 And, hovering, round it often did a raven ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... iniquity as into a theatre, to behold a sight—the sight of human nature in its lowest, most pitiable, and melancholy garb; in its hour of degradation, craziness, and desperation. He had his recreation in such a spectacle, as men can find their pleasure in the death-struggle of a malefacter on the gibbet. He came, not to join the miserable throng that crowded round the tables, exhibiting every variety of low, unhealthy feeling; nor did he come, in truth, prepared to meet with one in whose affairs and conduct he had so deep an interest. It ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... separation between political and judicial functions was a thing of which he had no conception. It had probably never occurred to him that there was in Bengal an authority perfectly independent of the Council, an authority which could protect one whom the Council wished to destroy, and send to the gibbet one whom the Council wished to protect. Yet such was the fact. The Supreme Court was, within the sphere of its own duties, altogether independent of the Government. Hastings, with his usual sagacity, had seen how much advantage he might ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you? Do you? None, I believe, ever thought that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken this fancy to me,—the strong sympathize with the strong. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... year 1798, on the baffled and dispersed United Irishmen. Of the chiefs imprisoned in March and May, Lord Edward had died of his wounds and vexation; Oliver Bond of apoplexy; the brothers Sheares, Father Quigley, and William Michael Byrne on the gibbet. In July, on Samuel Nelson's motion, the remaining prisoners in Newgate, Bridewell, and Kilmainham, agreed, in order to stop the effusion of blood, to expatriate themselves to any country not at war with England, and to reveal the general secrets of their system, without inculpating ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... his present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, they were met by a small vessel: the captain turned pale, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... and joy he beheld his first view end In a favourite prospects church that was ruin'd- But alas! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of the walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caused him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order'd it quick to be closed up again With a clump of Scotch firs that served for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... process against him they accuse him of nothing criminal. They cannot impute to him having joined with bad men. All that they charge him with is an attempt to give freedom to the republic, and to make Rome the centre of its government. And is this a crime worthy of the wheel or the gibbet? A Roman citizen afflicted to see his country, which is by right the mistress of the world, the slave of the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... under Cartier, and about fifty of their number perished before the coming of the spring. Their lot was rendered more dreadful still by quarrelling and crime. Roberval could keep his colonists in subjection only by the use of irons and by the application of the lash. The gibbet, reared beside the fort, claimed its toll ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, We both would mock the gibbet which the law has lifted high; HE in his meagre, shabby home, I in my roaring den— HE with his babes around him, I with my hunted men! His virtue be his bulwark—my genius should be mine!— "Go, fetch my pen, sweet Margot, and a jorum ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I do not like the public executioner being turned into the private executioner. I think ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to such decision must ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... But why are such notions absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of Relativity, of which we have previously spoken, may find its application here. These Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter which were drilled into us when young. Spirit and matter have ever been presented to us in the rudest contrast, the one as all-noble, the other as all-vile. But is this correct? Upon ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from mothers at large—to twist her own bow-string rather than build his gibbet. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... and prepared to defend his post, as he rightly guessed that it was destined to act against us. He sent off all his invalids to an Indian village at some distance, and exhorting his soldiers to stand by him, he erected a gibbet, and placed a guard on the road to Chempoalla. On the arrival of the deputation from Narvaez at Villa Rica, they were astonished to meet none but Indians, as Sandoval had ordered all the soldiers to remain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... They fought with the fury of despair, neither expecting nor receiving quarter. More than twenty thousand of the citizens fell in the battle, and were left, by the King's order, unburied on the field. The corpse of Artevelde, who had been suffocated in the press, was hanged on a gibbet for a warning to all demagogues. With him died the day-dream of an independent Flanders. Though her cities remained prosperous, they were destined to be successively the subjects of the Burgundian, the Spaniard, and the Austrian. It was only in 1831 that Flanders ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... has come from Sam Adams's meddling," said Mr. Shrimpton. "May the Devil take him and John Hancock. They ought to be hanged, and I hope King George will yet have a chance to string 'em up—curse 'em! I'd like to see 'em dangling from the gibbet, and the crows picking their bones," he said, smiting his fists together, walking to ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment as is the curse and wrath of God; O how precious an esteem ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... few of his friends, did so," replied the young stranger with a smile, "and we admire them very much for so doing, but I am afraid we should hang them, nevertheless, if they were in a position to try the thing over again. The illustration of the gibbet and the statue might have more applications than one, for I sincerely believe, if we could revive historical characters, we should almost in all cases erect a gallows for those to whom we now ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... lineaments to trace, The rustick grandeur, or the surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett, . . . the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett's supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a violent bleeding ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... apportioned to offences in the time of Solon, partly from the high price of money, but partly, also, from the wise moderation of the lawgiver. The last grave penalty of death was of various kinds, as the cross, the gibbet, the precipice, the bowl—afflictions seldom in reserve for ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thousand florins reward to the man who should bring you the head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the less dear to Florence because ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free. Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee 70 The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was likest of men to Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat; and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmad al-Danaf and Ali al-Zaybak of Cairo.[FN102] Now they had brought Ala al-Din to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmad al-Danaf came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, "Give me room to do my duty." He replied, "O accursed, take this man and hang him in Ala al-Din's stead; for he is innocent and we will ransom him with this fellow, even as Abraham ransomed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... as well civil as religious, of the Bohemians. For Ferdinand, not content to scotch the snake, never rested till it had ceased to be. The Carolinum, with all its endowments, privileges, and libraries, was handed over to its rival. Protestantism was declared to be extinct; and the gibbet, and the stake, and confiscations, and banishments, rendered the decree, in due time, more than an idle boast. There is, probably, no instance on record of an extirpation of a religious creed more absolute than that which ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... who know the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do suffer fullest ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... in an authoritative tone. "Are ye mad?" he said, "or would ye execute an act of justice as if it were a crime and a cruelty? This sacrifice will lose half its savour if we do not offer it at the very horns of the altar. We will have him die where a murderer should die, on the common gibbet—we will have him die where he spilled the blood ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... cries aroused me; sitting up in the dark, I heard men going along the street, roaring news of a hanging that had just taken place. "Execution of Mrs."—I forget the name of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... and tear him limb from limb. Are we going to sit still while he terrorizes the whole country? While he 'hustles' every head of stock from us, and—and spirits it away? No, if we spend fortunes upon his capture we must not rest until he swings from a gibbet at the end ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... "a column [the insignia of jurisdiction] or gibbet of stone, which is usually placed at the entrances of towns or villages; on which are ignominiously exposed the heads of persons executed or of criminals" (Barcia, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... presently reappeared bringing a lute; and the Caliph took not of it and knew it for that of Abu Ishak the Cup-companion.[FN55] "By Allah," said the Caliph, "if this damsel sing ill I will crucify all of you; but if she sing well I will forgive them and only gibbet thee." "O Allah cause her to sing vilely!" quoth Ja'afar. Asked the Caliph, "Why so?"; and he answered, "If thou crucify us all together, we shall keep one another company." The Caliph laughed at his speech. Presently the damsel took the lute ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and other vices too, Why should not reason use her own just sense, And square her punishments to each offence? Suppose a slave, as he removes the dish, Licks the warm gravy or remains of fish, Should his vexed master gibbet the poor lad, He'd be a second Labeo, STARING mad. Now take another instance, and remark A case of madness, grosser and more stark. A friend has crossed you:—'tis a slight affair; Not to forgive it writes you down a bear:— You hate the man and his acquaintance fly, As Ruso's debtors hide from ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... up at once and off we go, unless we're anxious to exhibit Our fairy forms all in a row, strung up upon the Castle gibbet! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the arts of government ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... shore we skirted, near Enough to scare the birds with our white sails, We saw a three-limbed gibbet rising sheer. Detached against the ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... a woeful path they found, and their sister's son wounded on a gibbet, wind-cold outlaw-trees,[122] on the town's west. Ever vibrated the ravens' whet: there ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... compromise, and to make my brother (his family of course included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular that you can—what advantage will you ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since civilization dawned ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... one cry sent Even from the hideous gibbet height, 'Praise to the Lord Omnipotent, The vultures have a ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... and smell the fruits and he could not but admit that it was even so as they had avouched. Then said the boy-Kazi to the boy-defendant, " 'Tis clear thou art a rogue and a rascal, and thou hast done a deed wherefor thou richly deservest the gibbet." Hearing this the children frisked about and clapped their hands with glee and gladness, then seizing hold of him who acted as the merchant of Baghdad, they led him off as to execution. The Commander of the Faithful, Harun al-Rashid, was greatly pleased at this acuteness of the boy who ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... sanguinary conflicts with the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies from Montfaucon and see ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... come to the main road (at the far end of this semi-private road) turn to the right, and just where the gibbet used to stand, so it is said, in the good old days, there is a sharp left-angled turn which leads to the village of E——. Keep straight on, however, for a mile or two (notice the fine old timbered houses on the right of the footpath opposite the old boundary-post), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... against a soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, all those present believing it would be a great pleasure ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... curtain is drawn up and discovers a gibbet and Pulcinello standing on a ladder affixed to it with a rope round his neck. The showman with the utmost gravity and assumed melancholy informs the audience that a most serious calamity is about to happen to Naples: that Signor Pulcinello is condemned to be hanged for a robbery, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... doubt right in considering the lucubrations of the poet Baudelaire, and his necrophile imagination of his own carrion hung on a gibbet and devoured by vultures, as a mixture of sadism and masochism. He sought out the most repulsive women of all races, Chinese, negresses, dwarfs, giants, or modern women as artificial as possible, to satisfy his pathological instinct. The following case quoted by Krafft-Ebing ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the other day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; and the next minute a bullet was in his heart. Dear brethren, do you turn to Jesus Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... in subsequent conversations learned that Mrs. Lincoln had no sympathy for the South. "Why should I sympathize with the rebels," she would say; "are they not against me? They would hang my husband to-morrow if it was in their power, and perhaps gibbet me with him. How then can I sympathize with a people at war with me and mine?" She always objected to ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... 'prentice-boy and pretty girl! Passed away tipsy trainband-man with wig and bandolier! On the spot where Tom Idle (for whom I have an unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blazing temper," remarked Hamilton. "Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright. I wish to God he'd strung the first to a gibbet!" ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... there until he died. And how many others! I have tried, without success, to find whether in battles and forays the Marshal committed any serious misdeeds. I have discovered nothing, except that he had a pronounced taste for the gibbet; for he liked to string up all the renegade French whom he surprised in the ranks of the English or in the cities which were not very much ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... oh, shame to say! They were seized from behind, their arms bound behind their backs, and, in spite of their protests, led out on the watch tower, where was a permanent gibbet, and, in sight of all their ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... Offley to perform the duties of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed on gallows, were taken away by ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... disorderly and fast we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... right hand might be seen the vassals of that renowned Mynheer, Michael Paw, who lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia, and the lands away south even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island. His standard was borne by his trusty squire, Cornelius Van Vorst; consisting of a huge oyster recumbent upon a sea-green field; being the armorial bearings of his favorite metropolis Communipaw. He brought to the camp a stout force of warriors, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... strove 'Gainst Marmion's force to stand; To him he lost his lady-love, And to the king his land. Ourselves beheld the listed field, A sight both sad and fair; We saw Lord Marmion pierce his shield, And saw his saddle bare; We saw the victor win the crest He wears with worthy pride; And on the gibbet-tree, reversed, His foeman's scutcheon tied. Place, nobles, for the Falcon-Knight! Room, room, ye gentles gay, For him who conquered in the right, Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... impute to him having joined with bad men. All that they charge him with is an attempt to give freedom to the republic, and to make Rome the centre of its government. And is this a crime worthy of the wheel or the gibbet? A Roman citizen afflicted to see his country, which is by right the mistress of the world, the slave of the vilest ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... committed a wrong, and wished to make restitution; or they had left debts which they were anxious to pay; or they had advice, or warnings, or threats to communicate; or they had been murdered, and were determined to bring their assassins to the gibbet. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... with Robert Bovill' What in Heaven's name did one of Coffyn blood with Robert? If ever man had a devil, 'twas he. I mind his sullen black face and his beard in two prongs. I have heard he is dead—on a Panama gibbet?" ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of heroism ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... battled for their homes, lives, and liberty for eighty years. For four-fifths of a century they faced not only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet, the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, "and all men know, or dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... it gives me a shudder to name it! We were within the castle, and they set up the gibbet before our eyes. Before the eyes of the son of the one man, the wife and son of the other! I remember catching up Isabel, and running with her into an inner chamber—any whither to be out of sight of that awful thing. I remember, ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... "The family gibbet, I presume, is in good working order?" asked the king of the family executioner, a tall gaunt man in black and scarlet, who was only employed in the case of ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... not propose, O valiant grave-diggers, to depreciate your merits; such is far from being my intention. I have that in my notes, on the other hand, which will do you more honour than the story of the gibbet and the Frog; I have gleaned, for your benefit, examples of prowess which will shed a new lustre upon ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; let me ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself unenviably conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the gibbet for breaches of military discipline. By his servile cruelty he had earned the nickname of the Manhunter. Shower deserved, if any offender deserved, to be excepted from the Act of Indemnity, and left to the utmost rigour of those laws ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mutinied against him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies. This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was instantly without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned to death by the rebellious barons: he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was cut in pieces, and thrown to the dogs;[****] and his head was sent to Winchester, the place whose title he bore, and was there set on a pole and exposed to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... from its comparative harmlessness, and from its being not so much a madness as a folly of the people. Unlike other notions that sprang from the belief in witchcraft, and which we have already dwelt upon at sufficient length, it has sent no wretches to the stake or the gibbet, and but a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... paltry booty of lame horses and lean kine, or squealing and dealing death in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats. One after another closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet or the Baron's dule-tree. For the rusty blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their descendants alone, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his favourite, ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be done ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... Dessauer, at sight of so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted eight days ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... erected a gibbet, two posts and a horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with a cord of parau bark passed through the scalp and tied around the hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... give up the Netherlands, and all his foreign possessions, and to retire to his hereditary dominions. "What a severe sentence," exclaimed Count Zinzendorf, the emperor's ambassador, "have you passed on the emperor. No malefactor was ever carried with so hard a doom to the gibbet." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the Danish Queen, As she struck the board with vigour: “To-morrow, ere folk to breakfast go, On a gibbet thou shalt figure!” ...
— Alf the Freebooter - Little Danneved and Swayne Trost and other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape —that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros after him ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Holland over these children of the sun was at least an improvement on the tyranny which roasted them alive if they rejected religious dogmas which they could not comprehend, and which proclaimed with fire, sword, and gibbet that the Omnipotent especially forbade the nutmeg trade to all but the subjects, of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lane, ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes true, and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore fell upon ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... likely to possess it long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes from ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... which he himself was seized, but recovered. He converted many apostates, one of whom was a bashaw. By preaching the faith to the Mahometans he incurred the utmost severity of the Turkish laws, was twice imprisoned, and the second time condemned to a cruel death. He was hung on a gibbet by one hand, which was fastened by a chain, and pierced with a sharp hook at the end of the chain; and by one foot in the same manner. Having been some time on {357} the gibbet, he was released,[1] and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... sprites, That dames may listen to the sound at nights; . . . . . . Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, The golden-crested haughty Marmion, Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight, Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight, The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base. And think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the rest to be pierced with Lances, and run through with the point of the Sword, by a multitude of Men: And Anacaona her self who (as we said before,) sway'd the Imperial Scepter, to her greater honor was hanged on a Gibbet. And if it fell out that any person instigated by Compassion or Covetousness, did entertain any Indian Boys and mount them on Horses, to prevent their Murder, another was appointed to follow them, who ran them through the back or in the hinder parts, and if they chanced to escape ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... noble earls, on the side of mercy, would have had more weight and influence, had weight and influence been needed, if their own Government, after every rebellion, however small or under however great provocation, had not uniformly followed its victory by the gibbet, by imprisonment, by transportation of the men who had taken up arms against intolerable oppression. If noble earls of England had scrutinized English policy, and advised their own Government as they now advised the Government of the United States, some heroic lives would have been spared ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... rose-strewn, for thee and thy happiness still would I give it. Far afield, in the din and rush of maddening battle, Others have laid down their lives, nor wavered nor paused in the giving. What matters way or place—the cyprus, the lily, the laurel, Gibbet or open field, the sword or inglorious torture, When 'tis the hearth and the country that call for ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it tears the veil from ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... abbey on the queerest principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.[9] Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the game?" said Governor Manco; he gave orders, and immediately a gibbet was reared on the verge of the great beetling bastion that overlooked the Plaza. "Now," said he, in a message to the captain-general, "hang my soldier when you please; but at the same time that he is swung off in the square, look up to see your ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... drew on him much deserved, and some undeserved, censure. When the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, it was against the Chancellor that the rage of the populace was chiefly directed. His windows were broken; the trees of his garden were cut down; and a gibbet was set up before his door. But nowhere was he more detested than in the House of Commons. He was unable to perceive that the time was fast approaching when that House, if it continued to exist at all, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there flags waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music's myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth; a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl trying to win bread with the needle—the needle that has been called "the asp for the breast of the poor"—is not driven ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... glasses to the health of his Most Sacred Majesty, and the damnation of Red-nosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which has, through many generation% been a marked feature of the national character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotten remains of a prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the chief founder of her maritime greatness, and of her colonial empire, who had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... behold, whose sole aspiring hope Eccentrick soars to catch the hangman's rope. In order rang'd, with date of place and time, Each owner's name, his parentage and crime, High on his walls, inscribed to glorious shame, Unnumber'd halters gibbet him to Fame. ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... skims over whatever is sound, to detect and settle upon some spot which is tainted. But to the purpose. If I conduct thee or send thee a prisoner to St. Mary's, thou art to-night a tenant of the dungeon, to-morrow a burden to the gibbet-tree. If I were to let thee go hence at large, I were thereby wronging the Holy Church, and breaking mine own solemn vow. Other resolutions may be adopted in the capital, or better times may speedily ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... river, Bobadilla beheld on either bank a gibbet with the body of a Spaniard hanging on it, apparently but lately executed. He considered these as conclusive proofs of the alleged cruelty of Columbus. Many boats came off to the ship, every one being anxious to pay early court to this public censor. Bobadilla remained on board all day, in ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... The purpose intended is that we should not despair in death but entertain the unwavering assurance that the believers in the promised seed shall live, and be taken by God, whether from the water or the fire or the gibbet, or the tomb. We desire to live, and we shall live, namely the eternal life through the promised seed, which remains when this ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... fine portal of the original sanctuary is still to be seen. But of the old castle not a trace remains; only its name survives,—la Hourquie,—with its significant etymological story: Horcae,—furcae,—- fourches patibulaires,—the gibbet. For these viscounts of Morlaaes had recourse to a savage expedient to control the lawlessness of their day. They kept a gallows-tree erect before the castle gateway, a speaking symbol of vengeance, and there the blackened corpse, might ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... triumphant shouts of the Indians. Flames were seen bursting forth from the house. They burned up bright and clear in the night air. By their light he observed a man dragged along among a crowd of Indians. They stopped and appeared to be busily at work. In a short time a gibbet was erected near ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... breast. Knowing them, he saw no use in any appeal; also he saw that it was indeed her life or theirs. On the one hand, the downfall of all their hopes, the death or perpetual enslavement of many, and for himself surely the gibbet and the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Secunda, three virgins of Tuburga, had gall and vinegar given them to drink, were then severely scourged, tormented on a gibbet, rubbed with lime, scorched on a gridiron, worried by wild ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... murdering one of the public officers, escaped with his concubine to the church of St. Mary le Bow, where he defended himself by force of arms. He was at last forced from his retreat, condemned, and executed, amidst the regrets of the populace, who were so devoted to his memory, that they stole his gibbet, paid the same veneration to it as to the cross, and were equally zealous in propagating and attesting reports of the miracles wrought by it [p]. But though the sectaries of this superstition were punished by the justiciary [q], it received so little encouragement from the established ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and Smollett, which are ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... not? Those who are for it, will support it, and the remainder will undoubtedly see the reasonableness of paying the charges; while those who oppose or seek to betray it, must expect the more rigid fate of the jail and the gibbet. There is a bastard kind of generosity, which being extended to all men, is as fatal to society, on one hand, as the want of true generosity is on the other. A lax manner of administering justice, falsely termed ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that ill-looking figure that might have fallen from a gibbet—he listening and hiding here—Barnaby first upon the spot last night—can she who has always borne so fair a name be guilty of such crimes in secret!' said the locksmith, musing. 'Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... good old Bishop, in the early years of Christianity. Since then, thousands and thousands of noble souls have given their bodies to the gibbet and the stake, to help onward the slow progress of truth and freedom; a great unknown continent has been opened as a new, free starting point for the human race; printing has been invented, and the command, "Whatsoever ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... in new-made graves—bloody corpses of young men; The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud, And all these things bear ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Monsieur? Do you understand? As it was yesterday it is to-day! They killed the President La Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... right of the individual man. Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Pledges, as Lullies from Hedges. [2] We are not in fear to be drawn upon Sledges, But sometimes the Whip doth make us to skip And then we from Tything to Tything do trip; But when in a poor Boozing-Can we do bib it, [3] We stand more in dread of the Stocks than the Gibbet And therefore a merry mad Beggar I'll be For when it is night in the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... often surprised, cut to pieces by the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Noisy has made (without a pun) some noise in history. One of its ancient lords, Enguerrand de Marigny, was the inventor of the famous gibbet of Montfaucon, and in the poetic justice which should ever govern such cases he came to be hung on his own gallows. He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... verify the cheat of Perkin; and if the latter was astonishingly adroit, the king was ridiculously clumsy. 6. Perkin himself confessed his imposture more than once, and read his confession to the people, and renewed his confession at the foot of the gibbet on which he was executed.—Answer. I have shown that this confession was such an aukward forgery that lord Bacon did not dare to quote or adhere to it, but invented a new story, more specious, but equally inconsistent with, probability. 7. After Henry the ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the army of the Sultan Misnar, which had escaped to the mountains, were all drawn out, the cymbals sounded, and a gibbet forty feet high was erected in their front, to which the captain of the guard ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Elizabeth wished her subjects would be content to live together in unity of spirit, if not in unity of theory, in the bond of peace, not hatred, in righteousness of life, not in orthodoxy preached by stake and gibbet. She was content to wait and to persevere. She refused to declare war. War would tear the world in pieces. She knew her danger. She knew that she was in constant peril of assassination. She knew that if ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder? "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet. Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy. But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that justice which you and I shall need in that last, dreadful hour, when death will be ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... his success was attained. "Cortez and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... water in it and any number of rats. I was threatened with prosecution at their old Bailey, or Chatelet, with the Question (that is, the torture) ordinary and extraordinary, with the galleys for life as a wind-up, even if I escaped the gibbet in the place de Greve. Luckily for me, at this time the Gentleman of the Chamber fell into disgrace with Father la Chaise for eating a Chicken Sausage in Lent; and to spite him and the Minister, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... comrades in life. Four short days gone, the hands, then clasped by friendship, were fettered by hostile bonds. Yet nine days more and the darling of the army, the youthful hero of the hour, had dangled from a gibbet." ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... of British officers, one of whom holds a paper from which he reads. Facing the ruined Residency is a long grim row of gallows; below these, bound hand and foot and closely guarded is a row of prisoners. A signal is given, and from every gibbet swings what lately was a man. These are the ringleaders in the insensate tragedy, who, brought to justice by the strong resistless power of British bayonets, hang facing the scene of their infamy, for a sign throughout the length and breadth of Asia ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect a chapel for the good of his soul. The city was condemned for a time to the forfeiture of all its privileges. The body was cut down from the gibbet on which it had been hanging for three years, and accorded a solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, and all fathers of families were required to walk in the procession. When they came to the Schools, the citizens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and the cortege ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Raymond Berenger, your late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... bodies hidden from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Gore vindictively; "not one politician living has the brains or the art to defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one of them up to gibbet it." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... priests are all singing, Two ghastly heads on the gibbet are swinging; One is Jarl Hakon's and one is his thrall's, And the people are shouting from windows and walls; While alone in her chamber Swoons Thora, the fairest ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... like language, but which no one in Communipaw could understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology so that only those possessing the key could read it aright. This was made necessary in order to avoid the persecutions of the theologians of the Middle Ages, who fought the Secret Doctrine with fire and sword; stake, gibbet and cross. Even to this day there will be found but few reliable books on the Hermetic Philosophy, although there are countless references to it in many books written on various phases of Occultism. And yet, the Hermetic ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... an ironing-board. No games can be suggested but Thread-my-needle, and Thimble-rig. No books are at hand but Harper, with the fashion-plate at the end; the newspapers of the day are cut into uncouth shapes; and conversation (when conducted in English) hangs the unsuccessful Bloomer reform upon the gibbet of ridicule. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the times become murmurs against the prince. Under this gentle and pious sire, the gallows crack with the hung, the blocks rot with blood, the prisons burst like over full bellies. This king hath one hand which grasps, and one which hangs. He is the procurator of Dame Tax and Monsieur Gibbet. The great are despoiled of their dignities, and the little incessantly overwhelmed with fresh oppressions. He is an exorbitant prince. I love not this monarch. And ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... wild winter's spite — The gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave — Why should I ache, the season's slave? I'll sing from the top of the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of bazaars and brand-new hotels, the first glimpse gives us an insight into its life and meaning, makes us feel that we ought to have been living two or three hundred years ago. We glance back at the railway station, wondering whether a halt were wise, whether indeed the gibbet, wheel, and stake were not really prepared for ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... he was overcome, the king gave orders to put out his eyes, and afterwards to emasculate him; and his steward, William by name, who was the son of his stepmother, the king commanded to be hanged on a gibbet. Then was also Eoda, Earl of Champagne, the king's son-in-law, and many others, deprived of their lands; whilst some were led to London, and there killed. This year also, at Easter, there was a very great stir through all this nation and ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... appear before the awful bar to which you now strive prematurely to consign this noble, this gallant young man! Should you succeed, you must meet him there. Could you, in the presence of Almighty God—He who knows the inmost thoughts—justify your work of to-day? His mandate is not to the gibbet. Eternal Justice dictates there, whose decrees are eternal. Do you think of this? Do you defy it? If not—if you invoke it, do it through your acts toward your fellow-man. Have you to-day done unto this man as you would he should do unto you? I pause for a ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... coals, call to order; take to task, reprove, lecture, bring to book; read a lesson, read a lecture to; rebuke, correct. reprimand, chastise, castigate, lash, blow up, trounce, trim, laver la tete[Fr], overhaul; give it one, give it one finely; gibbet. accuse &c. 938; impeach, denounce; hold up to reprobation, hold up to execration; expose, brand, gibbet, stigmatize; show up, pull up, take up; cry "shame" upon; be outspoken; raise a hue and cry against. execrate &c. 908; exprobate[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... one of the banditti, "Nature's own hand has marked you out for an assassin—come, prithee be frank, and tell us how thou hast contrived so long to escape the gibbet? In what gaol didst thou leave thy last fetters? Or from what galley hast thou taken thy departure, without staying ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... doctrines" had been uncertain and wavering. It was by no means impossible that, imitating the example of the Elector of Saxony, the French monarch should even yet put himself at the head of the movement. Severe persecution had, indeed, dogged the steps of the Reformation. Fire and gibbet had been mercilessly employed to destroy it. The squares of Paris had already had the baptism of blood. But the cruelties complained of by the "Lutherans," if tolerated by Francis, had their origin in the bigotry of others. The Sorbonne ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... indictment; for which the commissioners ordained him, upon Wednesday, 21 May, 1656, betwixt two and four hours in the afternoon, to be taken to the ordinary place of execution for the Burgh of Dumfries, and there to be hanged on a gibbet while [till] he be dead, and all his ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the body just for style, And they hung him in chains for the volatile Wind to scour him flesh from bones. Way out on the moor you can hear the groans His gibbet makes when it blows a gale. ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" One last long peal of thunder,— The clouds are cleared away. And the glorious sun once ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... neighbourhood in 1655, and Monmouth, in 1685, marched through Chard en route, as he thought, for the throne, a circumstance which Jeffreys did not allow the town to forget. "Hangcross tree," which once stood near the L. & S.W. station, was long locally reputed to be the gibbet on which some of the Duke's sympathisers expiated their treason. The town is nowadays chiefly dependent upon a large lace works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn down Axminster ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... the novelist contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. Ah, my fingers itch to be at ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and again; and the Goldberg Catechism of 1558, for which he ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... according to their deserts; but fearing the captain of the pirates should make his escape (as he had formerly done, being their prisoner once before) they judged it safer to leave him guarded on ship-board for the present, while they erected a gibbet to hang him on the next day, without any other process than to lead him from the ship to his punishment; the rumour of which was presently brought to Bartholomew Portugues, whereby he sought all possible ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... Hellespont, an unfavorable wind detained them four days at Abydus, where the general exhibited a memorable lesson of firmness and severity. Two of the Huns, who in a drunken quarrel had slain one of their fellow-soldiers, were instantly shown to the army suspended on a lofty gibbet. The national dignity was resented by their countrymen, who disclaimed the servile laws of the empire, and asserted the free privilege of Scythia, where a small fine was allowed to expiate the hasty sallies of intemperance and anger. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... at once and off we go, unless we're anxious to exhibit Our fairy forms all in a row, strung up upon the Castle gibbet! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the manner of the English officer vanished, and taking the offered hand of the other, he replied with warmth, "Your generous confidence, Peyton, will not be abused, even though the gibbet on which your Washington hung Andre be ready ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... an English gibbet," continued the elated marine; "for had a court-martial or a court-civil discussed the manner of our entrance into this island, I doubt whether we should have fared better ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... us!—For my part, I always do my duty without malice, and with a light heart, and I never love a man better than when I have put my scant of wind collar about his neck, to dub him Knight of the order of Saint Patibularius [patibulum, a gibbet], as the Provost's Chaplain, the worthy Father Vaconeldiablo [possibly Baco (Bacchus) el Diablo (the Devil)], is wont to call the Patron ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... accordance with the barbaric code of Russia, were punished with awful severity. Some were whipped to death. Some were mutilated and exiled to Siberia, and many perished on the scaffold. Fifteen officers of high rank were placed together beneath the gibbet, with ropes around their necks. As the drop fell, the rope of one broke, and he fell to the ground. Bruised and half stunned he rose upon his knees, and ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... loud cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... about fifty of their number perished before the coming of the spring. Their lot was rendered more dreadful still by quarrelling and crime. Roberval could keep his colonists in subjection only by the use of irons and by the application of the lash. The gibbet, reared beside the fort, claimed ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... to the lot of Thomas Offley to perform the duties of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... personal consideration, independence, or freedom, each of which he would turn to abuse, must be taught, by external force, and from motives of fear, to counterfeit those effects of innocence, and of duty, to which he is not disposed: he must be referred to the whip, or the gibbet, for arguments in support of a caution, which the state now requires him to assume, on a supposition that he is insensible to the motives which recommend ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... column [the insignia of jurisdiction] or gibbet of stone, which is usually placed at the entrances of towns or villages; on which are ignominiously exposed the heads of persons executed or of criminals" (Barcia, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... murmur, and at nightfall left the cottage in Danny's company. Two hours afterwards Hardress himself arrived in a fit of compunction. On learning that they had departed, he swore to himself that if this his servant exceeded his views, he would tear his flesh from his bones, and gibbet him as a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... already befallen him. The very construction of his kingship was built upon the destruction of his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... paint. On the twenty-second of April she was taken out to be sacrificed, attended by the warriors, each of whom carried two pieces of wood which he had received from her hands. Her body having been painted half red and half black, she was attached to a sort of gibbet and roasted for some time over a slow fire, then shot to death with arrows. The chief sacrificer next tore out her heart and devoured it. While her flesh was still warm it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... removal, nor even the investigation of this cause, has ever once been seriously attempted. Laws of the most sanguinary and unconstitutional nature have been enacted; the country has been disgraced and exasperated by frequent and bloody executions; and the gibbet, that perpetual resource of weak and cruel legislators, has groaned under the multitude of starving criminals; yet, while the cause is suffered to exist, the effects will ever follow. The amputation of limbs will never eradicate a prurient humour, which must be sought ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... exclaimed James. "Ye dinna say so? God's santie! man, but this is grewsome, and gars the flesh creep on one's banes. Let his foul carcase be taen awa', and hangit on a gibbet on the hill where Malkin Tower aince stood, as a warning to a' ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bathed in perspiration, trembling as if it had just come in from a long gallop; and at last it was found out that Parson Darby belonged to the gang of highwaymen on Bagshot Heath. He was caught red-handed, and hanged close to the Golden Farmer in chains on a gibbet of which the posts were still standing forty years ago. But what became of his black horse no one ever could tell me. Now the London road is as safe and quiet as any other well-kept highway, and the wildest passengers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of our vagabonds has greatly diminished. In your Henry's reign it is affirmed that no fewer than 72,000 criminals were hanged; you have yourself described them as strung up by scores upon a gibbet all over the country. Even in the golden days of good Queen Bess the executions were from three to four hundred annually. A large allowance must be made for the increased humanity of the nation, and the humaner temper with which the laws are administered: but the new ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the shore was seen the remains of a gibbet, supposed to be that set up by Magalhaens for the execution of one of his rebellious captains. On landing, two huge natives, called by that navigator Patagons, came down and appeared to be friendly, being ready to receive whatever was offered to them. They ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... others!" returned John. "They're a nice lot, ain't they? You say this cruise is bungled. Ah! by gum, if you could understand how bad it's bungled, you would see! We're that near the gibbet that my neck's stiff with thinking on it. You've seen 'em, maybe, hanged in chains, birds about 'em, seamen p'inting 'em out as they go down with the tide. 'Who's that?' says one. 'That! Why, that's John Silver. I knowed him well,' says another. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... rustick grandeur, or the surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry can 'scape, [q]They ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... message. One officer cried out that Phips was a pirate and that his messenger should be hanged. Frontenac knew well how to deal with such a situation. He threw the letter in the envoy's face and turned his back upon him. The unhappy man, who understood French, heard the Governor give orders that a gibbet should be erected on which he was to be hanged. When the Bishop and the Intendant pleaded for mercy, Frontenac seemed to yield. He would not take, he said, an hour to reply, but would answer at once. He knew no such person as King William. James, though ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... to Pope Alexander VI. On the 23rd of May, 1498, he met his doom in the great piazza at Florence where in happier days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno. Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange and complex character has been so ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... been expected. That they were unnecessarily severe was due chiefly to the greed of a clique of politicians; partly also to the fact that the North misunderstood us and our black wards, even as we persist in misunderstanding the "Yankee." But no gibbet rose in that storm-swept waste; our very leaders now occupy positions of honor and trust under the flag they defied. Let us not requite the generosity of our erstwhile foes by an attempt to tarnish their well-earned laurels. Rather ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the horizon's bounding hills, where distant vision fails, All stealthily, with eyes on earth, and shrinking from the sight, As a nocturnal robber holds his dark and breathless flight, And thinks he sees the gibbet spread its arms in solemn wrath, In every tree that dimly throws its shadow on ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of these wretches, called Hesselts, used at length to sleep during the mock trials of the already doomed victims; and as often as he was roused up by his colleagues, he used to cry out mechanically, "To the gibbet! to the gibbet!" so familiar was his tongue with the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... was attained. "Cortez and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the largest not over one hundred tons and some were even undecked boats. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... them skirl, Till roof and rafters a' did dirl.— Coffins stood round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... forgive you for promising two thousand florins reward to the man who should bring you the head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the less dear to Florence because they were less ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... split it. His subjects cut up by his subjects were only capers to his leg of mutton. From none of his palaces and parks was there any view so rural, so composing to his spirits, as the shambles. When these were not fresh, the gibbet would do. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... army of the Sultan Misnar, which had escaped to the mountains, were all drawn out, the cymbals sounded, and a gibbet forty feet high was erected in their front, to which the captain of the guard led the unfortunate ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... greatest sway over the human mind and Christianity was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the decree ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... main road (at the far end of this semi-private road) turn to the right, and just where the gibbet used to stand, so it is said, in the good old days, there is a sharp left-angled turn which leads to the village of E——. Keep straight on, however, for a mile or two (notice the fine old timbered houses on the right of the footpath opposite the old boundary-post), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... rooms were hung with drawings of masterly excellence. A portfolio was filled with sketches of equal skill,—but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,—the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from the ideal to show that they were portraits; in ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all we do, Will haunt us fools, and other vices too, Why should not reason use her own just sense, And square her punishments to each offence? Suppose a slave, as he removes the dish, Licks the warm gravy or remains of fish, Should his vexed master gibbet the poor lad, He'd be a second Labeo, STARING mad. Now take another instance, and remark A case of madness, grosser and more stark. A friend has crossed you:—'tis a slight affair; Not to forgive it ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... was rejected. The parties became exasperated, and an attack ensued. The Spanish government basely and wickedly delivered Oge to his enemies. He asked for a defender to plead his cause; but he asked in vain. Thirteen of his companions were condemned to the galleys; more than twenty to the gibbet; and Oge and Chavanne were tortured ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... stature, their habitat appears fixed upon the shores of the Strait at the southern extremity of Patagonia, and not at fifteen days' sail from Port Desire, at which Drake arrived on the 2nd June. On the following day he reached the harbour of St. Julian, where he found a gibbet erected of yore by Magellan for the punishment of some rebellious members of his crew. Drake in his turn, chose this spot to rid himself of one of his captains, named Doughty, who had been long accused of treason and underhand dealing, and who on several occasions had ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the prisoner. But the sentence had hardly been carried out when the temper of the mob appeared to change. Stones were thrown, angry cries were raised, and the mob, as if animated by a common purpose, began to press around the scaffold. One man leaped upon the gibbet and cut the rope by which the body was suspended; others gathered round as if to carry off the body. Then it is asserted that Porteous completely lost his head. The passion that had been swaying him all day entirely overmastered ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... insufficient to meet the necessities of so rapidly increasing a people. The father of the gentleman to whom we have alluded, was, for this offence, one of the first victims to his imprudence. The revolutionary mob proceeded to his residence, from whence they took him, and hung his body upon a gibbet; they next proceeded to destroy the rooks and pigeons which he had cultivated in great numbers, and strived to preserve with the same tenacity as others do in this country. We are told by the son of this martyr to his own ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... his nose at her, conceived the wild idea of attaching himself to her for life. With this in view he determined to follow her in order to ascertain whither she would lead him—to Paradise or to the limbo of hell—to a gibbet or to an abode of love. Anything was a glean of hope to him in the depth of his misery. The lady strolled along the bank of the Loire towards Plessis inhaling like a fish the fine freshness of the water, toying, sauntering like ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... shameful circumstance, the editor of the Georgia Chronicle, a professor of religion, said that Dresser "should have been hung up as high as Haman, to rot upon the gibbet until the wind whistled through his bones. The cry of the whole South should be death, instant death, to the Abolitionist, wherever he is caught." What a great and ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... the earth. If I thought it would do any good to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or that their wonderful escapes were effected by the ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... all these were set on to boil in a great kettle, or cauldron, which, as fast as it grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon's blood: to these they poured in the blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they bound the infernal spirits ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... in state and in church, such as exposed them to the natural and reasonable suspicion of being wild and mischievous anarchists. The opportunities and temptations that come to those in power would be a test of the quality of the sect more severe than trial by the cart-tail and the gibbet. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... will continue to combat it, by all my efforts as a writer, by all my words and all my votes as a legislator! I declare it before the crucifix; before that Victim of the penalty of death, who sees and hears us; before that gibbet, in which, two thousand years ago, for the eternal instruction of the generations, the human law ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... other day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; and the next minute a bullet was in his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... emperor in the egg—so dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two destinations appropriate for the close of his career—a gibbet or a throne. ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "Mercy!" as she looked at the sheet; for while I knew not, then, the strange device upon the paper, I knew, by and by, that it was a gibbet. Beneath it were the words: "Money thirst shall burn like ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know Extorted from his fellow creature's woe. Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, 315 There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign Here, richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train; 320 Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... England! The witch is taken!" And so running disorderly and fast we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes true, and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... the words mercy and charity, the signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Chapter XLIV, in which the novelist contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. Ah, my fingers itch to be ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... almost an endearing sound, was Jacob Harris, a Jew pedlar of astonishing turpitude, who, after murdering three persons at an inn on Ditchling Common and plundering their house, was hanged at Horsham in the year 1734, and afterwards suspended, as a lesson, to the gibbet, of which this post—Jacob's Post—is ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... lodge to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near the bridge. Bring ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... were for him a matter of entire indifference; his horse is loaded with a heavy pack, against which the rider comfortably leans, while he puts a long horn to his lips. He has no sword, or any weapon of defence; but the two grisly figures by the roadside dangling on a gibbet, and his own inimitable expression of contented ease, seem to imply that travelling is secure for him, ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... know the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do suffer fullest ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... breech of one of the Bellerophon's guns, spy-glass in hand. "By gar, mon Empereur," says Count Bertrand, "dey have erect von prospect for you." The "prospect" is far from encouraging—a fort with the English flag flying from the central tower, and a gibbet erected in front of it. No wonder that the emperor expresses himself dissatisfied with a "prospect" of so lugubrious a character. An English sailor seated on a neighbouring gun, delivers the sentiments of the day after the plain-spoken ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... fiercely through the crowd, till he reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Boston in flames and Quebec triumphant, and the print explains that thus popery and tyranny will triumph over true religion, virtue and liberty. Among the other personages, look at the kneeling figure of a Catholic priest, with cross in one hand and gibbet in the other, assisting King George, as the print again says, in enforcing his tyrannical system of civil and religious liberty: What do you think of that? Does it look like the real fellowship for us which they profess in their proclamations? Liberty and independence ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... the name of Darby, were hung in chains near Hales-Owen, since which time there has been only one murder committed in the whole neighbourhood, and that under the very gibbet upon which they hung[5]. ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... some guns, could not have escaped from the smallest privateer. In his present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, they ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... better for them. Therefore, in revolutions, as a body, they remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually, they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest them of the quibbles whereby these expounders—or confounders—of codes fatten on the credulity ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... home heard that in Cheapside there had been but a little before a gibbet set up, and the picture of Huson hung upon it in the middle of the street. [John Hewson, who had been a shoemaker, became a Colonel in the Parliament Army, and sat in judgement on the King: he escaped hanging by flight, and died ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... mosque and then began his personal supplications. An old woman, who happened to be near him, exclaimed: "O Allah! cause me to share in whatsoever he supplicates for." The man, overhearing her, then prayed: "O Allah! hang me on a gibbet, and cause me to die of scourging." The old trot continued: "O Allah! pardon me, and preserve me from what he has asked for." Upon this the man turned to her and said: "What a very unreasonable partner this is! She desires to share in all that gives rest ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... itself. The great work of emancipation had to be sealed, therefore, with the blood of the just, even as it was inaugurated with the blood of the just. The tragic history of the abolition of slavery, which opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close with the assassination ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Francis Morgan should be hung in chains upon the small island which is situated in the middle of the harbour, and named by the natives Mat-te-wan-ye, a gibbet was accordingly erected, and he was hung there, exhibiting an object of much greater terror to the natives, than to the white people, many of whom were more inclined to make a jest of it; but to the natives ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... on the back seat, for they dreaded to be seen, and at first they did not speak. But as soon as the carriage had started, as soon as they had left behind the sorrowful Calvary where his honor remained on the gibbet, Jansoulet, at the end of his strength, laid his head against his mother's shoulder, hid his face in a fold of the old green shawl, and there, shedding hot tears, his whole body shaken by sobs, the cry of his infancy came once more to his lips, his ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... too—gray-headed, with no young blood in him to excuse, no inexperience to extenuate), these deserved—did he say hanging? it was a harsher syllable—hell: and the contrite sinner gladly would have welcomed all the terrors of the gibbet, in hope to take full vengeance on himself for his wicked thirst for gold ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... and Huntingdon. He surprised several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed my ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... premeditated murder? "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet. Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy. But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... all its salutary restraints upon the passions, and all its noble incentives to a virtuous life. Nor would it be possible to enforce the laws of morality by mere temporal sanctions, the fear of exile, the dungeon, or the gibbet, when conscience no longer enforced the dictates of religious faith. The great auxiliary and support of all human authority is to be found in that most noble attribute of human nature—the sense of duty, which ceases ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... James; he is a sweet gentleman.' Again, on the following morning, she fell at his feet, beseeching his royal clemency, when he spurned her from him, saying, 'John James, that rogue, he shall be hanged; yea, he shall be hanged.' And, in the presence of his weeping friends, he ascended from the gibbet to the mansions of the blessed. His real crime was, that he continued to preach after having been warned not to do so by John Robinson, lieutenant of the Tower, properly called, by Mr. Crosby,[233] a devouring wolf, upon whose head ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... types of thought applied to illustrate the unknown details of the hereafter. The judge orders the culprit to be disgraced, scourged, put in the stocks, or cropped and transported. The sultan hurls those he hates into the dungeon, upon the gibbet or into the flame, with every accompaniment of mockery and pain. So, an imaginative instinct concludes, God will deal with all who offend him. They will be excluded from his presence, imprisoned ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... showed it to his council, which declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation, everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated gibbet of Montfaucon,—the first mention of it in history, though it had been long ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... like one prepared to fly. Yon wight behold, whose sole aspiring hope Eccentrick soars to catch the hangman's rope. In order rang'd, with date of place and time, Each owner's name, his parentage and crime, High on his walls, inscribed to glorious shame, Unnumber'd halters gibbet him ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... light, decorated his guest with an old night-gown, and, having made him take off a cordial, requested to know what had brought him to the gibbet. It would have been a truly singular exhibition, observed Junker, to have seen me, at that late hour, engaged in a tete-a-tete with a dead man decked ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... of old-time punishments most gruesome of all are the gibbet-irons wherein the bones of some wretched breaker of the laws hung and rattled as the irons creaked and groaned when stirred by the breeze. Pour l'encouragement des autres, our wise forefathers enacted that the bodies of executed criminals should be hanged in chains. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
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